Cyberpunk 2077 is probably the most overhyped game ever. CD Projekt Red made one amazing game, The Witcher 3 and since then they lived from the reputation they got from the game, without really living up to the reputation. Now Cyberpunk was promised to be the game of the generation. NPCs would have a real day and night cycle, they would go to work, react to your decisions and overall it promised a world that was way beyond what we had since then in the open world genre. Spoilers....nothing like that is in the final game. NPCs just walk in random directions, do senseless things and sometimes even walk through walls to disappear. The police was supposed to be corrupt, that you could sometimes pay them to let you go and that a real wanted system would be in the game. Guess what? Nothing like that is in the final game. When you do a crime police just spawn in your general vicinity and start shooting. That´s it. The life paths you choose at the start can be completed in 20 minutes, after that EVERYONE gets the same cutscene and you end up at the exact same place as everyone else. Dragon Age Origins did this better years ago. Frankly the game is unfinished. The bugs are numerous, it´s Fallout 76 bad, sometimes even worse. Add to that CD Projekt lying to their costumers about the state of the game on consoles, the crunch because of bad management, the insulting response after releasing the game unfinished and broken and you have a company that now is among the worst developers in the business. Never before has a company lost their reputation as fast as CD Projekt. Maybe they will finish the game in a year or two and add all the promised features. But until then the game is really underwhelming even when it runs.
The game got trashed after release and the reviewers were on point. The game IS a complete retread of the old Nintendo 64 games, but without ANY advances that were made in 3D platformers in the last years. The gameplay feels awful, jumping physics are not present, it´s just an animation that is played and therefore the gameplay feels just not right. The camera is atrocious, like they tried to emulate the awful camera sticks from the N64 gamepad....the only thing is we now have two analogue sticks, so there is no need for a camera that constantly swirls around the character and makes navigation a chore. The worlds are big, very big without any clear indication were you are supposed to go. Again, this was fine many years ago, now it is just pointless and hinders progression for no reason. Boss fights are painfully designed, Rambo for example you have to roll up a hill while logs roll down and try to knock you down, but the camera is so broken that it only looks down and not up like you need it to. The humor is painful and not funny, the characters are unlikable and the voice acting is atrocious. Stay away from this game, there are MUCH better 3D platformers out there....A Hat in Time showed how you do it....this is not it!
The game itself is great. The narrator is outstanding and the story is well told and dark. Decisions really change the outcome and while the game is rather short, you have to play it multiple times in order to get the different stories. BUT the game is horribly optimizied! The graphics are alright, but they rarely hit 60 fps. I could play Hellblade in highest settings with 60 fps throughout, or Prey or countless other games, but this struggles to keep a steady framerate! The options for graphics is downright insulting, giving you just four different settings to choose from (very low, low, med and high). At the start the game checks your hardware and sets the graphics accordingly. For my system it suggested low...with an i5 @3.5 GhZ, 8 GB DDR3 Ram, GeForce 1050 Ti with 8 gigs. That should tell you how much optimization went into this title! At a discount I would say go for it. It´s a good game, but beware that it runs like crap.
From the very first moments of Hellblade the voice acting, performance capture and writing suck the player into the world of Senua. Best experienced with headphones the voices that are almost constantly in your ear mock you, push you forward or try to hinder your progress. The delivery is flawless. You get sucked into the head of Senua and almost never leave it, only for a few fourth wall breaking moments, when Senua is looking directly at the player and adress the voices that are in her head. The gameplay is solid, fighting is satisfying and on the harder difficulty challenging. The world building is great, the graphics tend to look fotorealistic at times and surreal at others. All in all this is a must have. The surprise hit of the year so far!
OK, so I played No Man´s Sky now for about 13 hours and so far I must say that I am hooked. Sure there are almost always the same things to do, but the whole atmosphere and the graphics and nice writing keep me coming back for more. There are things that could be improved, like adding real quests or making the ships more different, adding the option to have full control over the ship in form of expert controls etc. Performance on my pc is good, sure it could be better, but it is far away from the problems reported by so many people here. I do think that Hello Games can improve on the basis and let´s face it....it IS just a basis and growing ground for things to come. This game has a LOT of potential, only the sky is the limit!
